Midterm Evaluation (16)
My vision had gone black as something yanked me away, and my wounded body was flung through the dark, tearing another scream out of me.
The moment my sight snapped back, a fist was already filling it. I wrenched my head to the right and barely dodged — but legs that had yet to recover could carry me only so far. The follow-up fist was more than I could handle, and as I lay sprawled face-down, unable even to stand, a foot came down hard on my face.
WHAM—
A black membrane sealed off the space around me, the terrain gouged bare and barren, and the owner of that foot seized me by the throat and hauled me up. Only then could I see his face clearly. His pupils had shifted to a faint violet, and thick, tar-black energy seeped from the hand gripping me.
"Keh-heh-heh... Been a while, hasn't it?"
"...A long... khak—"
"Yes, far, far too long. You have no idea how much I've waited... haha."
As he spoke, blood dripped from my abdomen — from the hole his buried fist had left — with a wet, ripping hiss. Before long the fist withdrew, and a mangled pit of blackened flesh took its place.
"Khh... khak."
"PUAHAHAHAHA!! You look about ready to fly!!"
I clenched my teeth against a pain as if my stomach itself had been reshaped, and perhaps because of it, a flood of blood welled up into my mouth. I desperately clapped a hand over my lips to hold it in, but there was no stopping what streamed from my nose as well — and the bastard, delighted by nothing more than the sight of me bleeding, kept dripping that nauseating laughter.
"How is it? Painful? Does it hurt?!"
"..."
"Whatever you're feeling, it's nothing next to what I've endured... heh heh."
"...Do you have a grudge against me?"
I asked because I truly couldn't guess — and his reaction was more theatrical than anything I'd imagined. A thread-thin vein rose at his temple, and his eyes had, before I knew it, flushed a dull red. The grip on my throat began squeezing harder, while his free hand trembled, badly.
He ripped his smiling expression away and screamed at me.
"Y-you... YOUUUU!!!!"
"Ghk... khk... Use your words..."
"It's all your fault!! Do you have any idea what I've been through?!!!!"
Naturally, I had no way of knowing — and reading my ignorance from my face, he seized my throat roughly and bellowed out everything that had happened to him since.
"...And that's my fault?"
"...What?"
His logic made no sense to me, and as though he'd misheard, he leaned in closer.
"...Say that again.."
"I'm saying... why would that be my... khk"
"Say it again."
"That's my fault...? Khak—"
The exchange repeated itself several times, always the same words, and each time his grip alternated between crushing and loosening. When even after quite some time my answer never changed, he flung me hard against the ground in a fit of temper.
"Khak..."
"You still don't seem to grasp what you did wrong... you wretch."
"..."
"What I mean is — a wretch like you, who lost his house and fell to the level of a commoner, daring to so much as sigh in my presence. That alone was the problem."
With a fishy smile spreading across his face, he carried on.
"Did you truly believe there were people who felt anything kind toward you? I'll guarantee you this much — at the Academy, there is not one soul who thinks well of you. Not a single one."
"..."
"I'm graciously educating you as you deserve — the least you could do is be thankful, no?"
"..."
"Had you quietly submitted to my instruction, you might even have become somewhat useful. Hahaha!!"
When the reaction he wanted never came, his laughter died mid-breath, his face hardened with displeasure, and he stomped down hard on my abdomen — on the very spot his earlier blow had caved in.
"Agh... AAAAGH!!"
"Why no answer? You don't seem to have gone mute on me just yet."
"Pf... pfffhehehe."
He didn't like the sight of me laughing through what should have been maddening agony. He lifted his foot from my stomach and brought it down on my left thumb instead.
"What's so funny."
CRUNCH—
"I asked what was so funny."
CRUNCH—
"You're still laughing?! Even now?!"
CRUNCH—
CR-CRUNCH—
CRUNCH—
Thumb, then index, middle, and last of all my little finger — even as he broke them one after another, the laughter would not stop, and at last he stared down at me as though he'd tired of it.
"Heh... hek..."
"What!! What is so funny!!"
"You... do you truly not know?"
"...Know what."
"Everything that has happened... isn't it all because you lost to me?"
BAM—
It was the sound of Leon — that fishy smile still on his lips — slamming my head into the floor.
"Khh... ah..."
"...Fine. I'll kill you slowly, just as you want."
With that, he hoisted my face up in one hand again, and with the other took hold of my broken left fingers.
CRUNCH—
SQUELCH—
"Ugh... aaah..."
"Now then, allow me to personally explain what I'm going to do to you."
"..."
"First, I will draw out your fingers. One by one. Slowly — slowly enough that you can watch the flesh stretch and tear."
"..."
"Once every finger is gone, next come the toes. Ah — but doing the same thing twice would be dull, so for the toes, I'll dig them out instead."
Saying so, Leon stripped off my shoe, set his finger against my right big toe, and pressed down hard. I felt his sharpened nail sink into the flesh and screwed one eye shut, but he paid it no mind and kept pushing. The pressure mounted until the tendon anchoring the toe snapped, and then I felt his finger burrowing into the top of my foot.
"Ghaa... khh."
"Yes... just like this. Slowly."
Like a man hoeing a field, he quite literally dug my toe out, leaving behind a groove the exact width of his finger where it had been. He dangled the blood-drenched toe he'd excavated before my eyes like a trophy, and blood seeped from my own lips as well, bitten through in my struggle to stay conscious.
"Next comes the face. That face of yours has grated on me since the old days."
"..."
"I'll peel the skin from it ever so thinly. Just enough to bare your eyes and your cheekbones. Keh-heh-heh."
"..."
"Ah — there it is. I can finally see fear taking root in your eyes."
"...You think you'll have the time?"
He cocked his head at that — then, in a flash of realization, laughed until tears came, wiping them away.
"PUAHAHAHA!! You... pfft... you were counting on the Chairwoman?! Of course — so that's why you've been acting so high and mighty!"
"..."
"Sorry to disappoint, but not even she will break through this place easily."
"...?"
"From what I hear, it's Demonkin magic — so even that Chairwoman of yours will need time to unravel it!!"
A race said to wield Magi freely as it pleases,
granting wishes and claiming a price in return.
I had been complacent — it had never once occurred to me to think along that line. What stood before my eyes was a Majin: a human who had received the power of the Demonkin. Which meant he had a Demonkin backer — and there was no chance they hadn't accounted for the Chairwoman when they invaded the Academy. However completely she had mastered magic, that mastery was, in the end, human magic. She could not possibly know, in its entirety, the magic of the Demonkin — a race so rare that meeting even one was said to be difficult. And so my rescue could only take time, and what would be done to me in the meantime was all too easy to predict.
It would be all right. I had always endured. I was used to—
"Kek-kek-kek... Finished deliberating?"
CRUNCH—
The sound of him ripping out one of my remaining fingers. The flesh still connected to it stretched long with a wet tearing hiss, and every time a piece ripped free, fresh pain came chasing after it.
"A word of warning in advance... if you grow them back, I'll simply pull them out again..."
I ground my teeth to bear it, but the pain did not lessen. He still held my throat, slowly drawing out my fingers with his remaining hand as he watched my reactions — and I still had my right hand. I swung its blade at his neck in a hurry, but the instant it touched, it rebounded.
TING—
As though it had struck solid steel. At the sight, Leon's expression twisted harsher still, and he wrenched the next finger free with a rougher, crueler twist.
"Ughaaaaa... ah..."
"If you still have the strength to defy me, spend it on staying conscious."
"Ugh... hh..."
"After all, it seems I can afford a good five minutes of leisure."
What followed was a familiar hell. He drew out my broken fingers slowly — so very slowly — twisting as he pulled, and I had no choice but to taste every last drop of that pain. Even when I blacked out beneath an agony I had suffered countless times yet never once grown used to, he always forced me awake to begin his amusement anew.
Before long, every finger had been drawn out, and he turned his gaze to my feet. Just as he had warned me, he began digging out my toes as well, unhurried, savoring the time — and where snapping bone and torn flesh had been the pain before, now came a new one: flesh and muscle pulped, tendons severed. I screamed on and on without pause, without exhaustion, until the blood that would not stop flowing had soaked him to the collar — until at last every toe had been dug out, and my feet had become, quite literally, rags. Rags so utterly ruined they seemed fit for nothing at all.
"Next... as I said — here."
The place he pointed to was my face. My voice was gone, worn out by wailing, and all I could do was shudder my naked eyelids. Somewhere along the way a black knife had appeared in his hand, and its blade began creeping toward the skin just below my eye. However desperately I thrashed, escape was utterly impossible — not against a body reinforced by his Majin transformation.
And so, once more, he shaved the skin of my face thin, slice by slice, like filleting raw fish, and my face slowly turned into something like meat drained of every drop of blood. Each time the rasping scrape and the wet rip circled my ears, lightning-strike pain rolled across it; my screams swelled louder and louder until, apparently finding them too noisy, Leon simply clamped his hand over my mouth and continued his work. And the screams that still spilled out filled the space inside the black membrane, echoing and echoing.
"Now that's a face worth looking at."
So spoke Leon, his 'work' complete, a smile of pure euphoria on his lips. Before him lay a man, face-down and unconscious, his state too hideous to put fully into words. His fingers and toes lay scattered around him, drenched in blood, and what had once been his hands and feet were mangled past all recognition. It was a sight that would make anyone who so much as glanced at it recoil in dread — and yet his face was worse still. His eyelids had been cut away, his eyeballs left wholly bare, and the rest of his skin laid bare with them. His cheekbones stood wholly exposed, his lips flayed away entirely. Gazing upon a face you would believe was a skull carelessly draped in skin, Leon's smile deepened into satisfaction. Perhaps becoming a Majin had opened the eyes of his sadistic nature — whatever the cause, the emotion called euphoria was dancing in his heart.
In his heart, he wanted to savor it longer, but any further delay was dangerous. The moment the Chairwoman might come bursting in was right under his nose. A pity, he thought — the entertainment ends here — and he drove the black blade into the man's heart, shoving it deep. So that he could never again come back to life with that strange trick of his.
'In the end, the one who survived is me... I won.'
He was the victor, and the victor is right. Therefore, nothing he had done was wrong. But as he thought this and made to leave — his feet, at some point, refused to move.
Because of the presence stirring directly behind him, its eyes rolled back, gleaming white.
[I'm... sob... sorry, child...]